The XER toolkit can be used to enhance and standardise your organisation’s progress updating and reporting process. It does this by providing a structured system for capturing progress achievements and commentary for schedule impacts from the people responsible for delivering activities within the project. There are five steps in the process.

Step one is carried out by the project planner or project controller in conjunction with the management team, whereby responsibility codes are assigned to activity within the schedule representing the individual who is tasked with providing progress information for that activity.

Step two is carried out by the project controller and is to define what we call project requests, which are again initially generated at the beginning of a project, separate requests are sent to each responsible person and consists of filtered list of activities from the schedule for which they are responsible, progress requests are sent as required each report cycle by email all of which is automated by the toolkit.

Step 3 each designated responsible person enters progress information for each activity they are responsible for delivering, including commentary for any impacts or noteworthy events, once all progress information has been entered the progress inputs are clicked to submit at which point the requester will be informed by email.

Step 4 the project controller reviews the progress information provided and can repeat the previous request steps 2 and 3 if further information or explanation is required.

Step 5 the toolkit provides a range of progress update reports which can also be exported to an excel workbook, the report can be shared with other toolkit users in the same way we share other reports and views.

To find out more about how the toolkits progress update feature works then head over to our website.